


Bouquet

by HenryMercury



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Aromantic Pansy Parkinson, Crying, F/F, Friendship, Gen, Hogwarts Eighth Year, Plants, romance novels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-19
Updated: 2018-04-19
Packaged: 2019-04-24 21:34:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14364156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HenryMercury/pseuds/HenryMercury
Summary: Lavender is hanging out with the Slytherins this year, and Parvati officially has no idea how the world works anymore.





	Bouquet

**Author's Note:**

> Thx NotTonightJosephine for reading over this for me x

Lavender is hanging out with the Slytherins this year, and Parvati officially has no idea how the world works anymore. _Her_ best friend sits elbow to elbow with Pansy Parkinson, Blaise Zabini, and occasionally Daphne Greengrass.

"What's up with that?" _every_ bloody person from Padma to Professor Hagrid has asked her, because she and Lav have always been the go-to authorities on one another.

 _I don't know, she hasn't talked to me since she got out of Mungo's,_ she can't bring herself to tell them in reply. _She's just abandoned me and I don't know why._

Whenever she tries to talk to Lav, the snakes turn and hiss (just figuratively, thank fuck). The way Lavender doesn't stop them makes it clear enough that she's not wanted there. She's not sure whether it's better or worse that, with the eighth year dorms all mixed-house, they're not even in the same room anymore. Instead of whispered midnight thoughts and pillow-muffled giggles she's got Millicent's deep snoring, and Hannah's snack horde attracting ants, and Daphne Greengrass' long, curly blonde hairs in every crevice. Hermione's dictatorial approach to cohabitation is old hat by now, but the campaign she's mounted against Hannah keeping food in the room is nearing badge-making level.

At least she's not stuck with Pansy. She doesn't think she could stomach rooming with the smug bitch who's stolen Parvati's best friend. Her... sometimes other things too. She and Lavender never had a _simple_ relationship, but it was always good regardless. For all Parvati knows, it's Pansy that Lavender's snogging when the room's empty now, curling up with after the lights are out and everyone else's breathing has evened out, and divining futures with on sunny afternoons where time stretches, where the sun pauses and hovers on its way down to the horizon. These were the moments Parvati used to wish would last forever—and while she'd known they couldn't, realistically, she isn't sure now that she really processed back then how much everything could change.

It's late morning on a Saturday. Hermione has gone to the library, Daphne has gone to see her sister, or something, while Millicent has decided consciousness is for plebs and is still snuffling into her pillow. Parvati sits on her bed near the window and reads one of the books she brought with her. It's a pulp romance of the kind she and Lav used to read together, alternately shivering at the sexual tension and making fun of the ridiculous words authors used to describe people's genitalia. Nobody ever just had a penis; they had a _quivering sex wand_ or a _throbbing broomstick shaft_ or a _ravenous basilisk_. Nobody ever just had a vagina, either. Parvati wasn't a fan of the _wand holster_ (which implied the whole purpose of vaginas was to have penises in them, a function Parvati had never desired for her own body) but she and Lav had laughed at the likes of _desolate pleasure cave_ and _chamber of secrets_ and _mystical chasm._

"Vaginas honestly aren't that mysterious," Parvati remembers Lavender saying once, in fifth year. Parvati had disagreed a bit, back then; her own body wasn't a mystery to her, but she'd never had a chance to explore any other woman's the way her fifteen-year-old self was just barely starting to come to terms with wanting to do.

"Everybody is a _bit_ mysterious," she'd said. "Until you've had a chance to learn about them."

Lavender had nodded, ever more knowledgeable in sexual matters. "Absolutely, Pav. You're so, so right. You should never assume what a new partner likes! How they're going to look under there! How their body will work! But that doesn't excuse acting like all vaginas are incomprehensible just because they're vaginas."

 _Lavender is so smart_ , Parvati remembers thinking. Hermione and a lot of their teachers never saw it—didn't want to see it—and it didn't always translate to being good at potions, or flying, or transfig. But Lavender knew things. Parvati had never learned as much about life from anyone other than her mum and Pads.

It isn't the same, sitting and reading without her there. She has to keep the funniest passages to herself, and misses the conversation she knows they'd be having about Ricardo leaving Eleanor because he'd been cursed never to be able to get hard again, and if he couldn't pop a boner then how could he be a man, and how could they be in love anymore?

 _Being a man and having a working penis—or having one at all!—are like, a venn diagram,_ she imagines Lavender saying. _Like, yeah, there's plenty of overlap, but you can have a penis and not be a man, and you can totally be a man without a penis. You can also be in love without having sex—duh. If these idiots would just talk about what they wanted from each other, then Ricardo would know Eleanor doesn't care about that—_

Parvati interrupts her inner Lavender. There's something to the idea of talking about it. Of not assuming. She slides her holographic bookmark in between the pages and sets the book aside.

On the window sill a few feet away, her plants are sunning themselves. She rubs one of the slim eye-shaped leaves of her curry plant between her fingers and smells the hint of home left behind on them. Then she picks up her wand and severs several stems of sage from the next plant across. Sage is Lavender's favourite herb; they always used to cleanse their dorm with it when Hermione wasn't there to tell them off. Parvati bundles the sage up and conjures a soft purple ribbon. Leafy bouquet in hand, she makes for the other eighth year girls' room.

❁

Friendship with Pansy Parkinson is not at all what Lavender expected from her life, but now that she's here in the reality of it, it doesn't seem so crazy. It's not like the rest of everything has turned out according to plan, anyhow. Pansy is... funny. In that needle-sharp, Slytherin way where you don't realise she's getting under your skin until it's happened. She's smart, in a way that's overlooked because too many other parts of her are louder. She's not pretty, but then neither is Lavender anymore.

"I'm thinking of trying something different," Pansy says, lounging on a stack of pillows at the head of her four-poster, black dragonskin-bound notebook in hand. "Something with Veela. It's everybody's fantasy, obviously, to fuck a Veela... but what does my romance consultant have to say about it?"

Lavender takes a minute to think. She picks at the firewhiskey and raisin chocolates Pansy gave her—the last ones remaining in a fancy box, left behind because Pansy doesn't like her sweets polluted by fruit.

"Well first off, you have to make sure that the person actually _likes_ the Veela. That they're not just roofied on hormones—"

"But I _love_ roofied-on-sex-hormones scenarios," Pansy interrupts petulantly.

"I know you do," answers Lavender. "But you asked me about romance, and this is what I've got to say."

Pansy is, despite her protests, jotting down everything Lavender suggests.

Pansy isn't a writer, _per se_ , but what she does is pretty close to penning the sorts of sexy novels Lavender and Parvati used to buy down at the used book store in Hogsmeade, where the elderly witch at the counter would wink at them as she counted up their sickles and knuts. Pansy's versions are more... illustrated.

Lavender hadn't known a daydream charm could be extended until it became something like a Muggle movie, but Pansy had found a way. The combination of a lot of research, focused Occlumency to picture a sequence of events in the mind's eye, a pensieve and an unusually strong daydream charm created a product Lavender felt sure would be the future of magical entertainment. They didn't feel like real memories, or anything—which Lavender thought would be just slightly _too_ voyeuristic—but their unreality only made them better. Everything was lit for the mood, the perspectives could shift through all the best angles, and there was never an unnecessary moment.

And all of it came down to the imagination of Pansy Parkinson: both highly creative and really fucking vivid.

It had begun before their eighth year even started, actually. Lavender had been at Ollivander's having her wand adjusted—a condition of being _allowed_ to keep it after being bitten. In a daze, she'd listened to Ollivander going on about what exactly he would be doing. She'd not absorbed much in the way of detail, but the long and short of it was that he was locking her wand so she couldn't use it while the moon was full. Because every month, she wouldn't be human—not only in the mirror, but in the eyes of everyone around her, and of the Ministry. Every month, all the rights that she had as a witch would be stripped away even more obviously than they had been on a daily basis since Greyback attacked her. It would have been enough to make anyone dash wet-eyed for the loos.

Ollivander's bathroom housed two cubicles with green doors, a polished white sink, and a cloudy old mirror against one of the green-papered walls. The left cubicle was locked when Lavender pushed through the door, and as she gripped the sink's edge and calmed her breathing, the sound of sniffling—sniffling other than her own—filtered past the thumping of her own pulse in her ears.

"Who's there?" she asked. It seemed like a slightly silly thing to say, but it was all she could think of.

"None of your business," answered Lavender's fellow crier. Her voice was deep but most likely feminine, husky—probably from the crying—and her words had a caustic bite to them that reminded Lavender of—

"Parkinson?" she guessed aloud, before she could stop herself.

"Leave me alone," the voice replied, rather than denying it.

"Parkinson, what are you in here for?"

"What does it fucking sound like?" Parkinson blew out a wet, frustrated sigh, and then the cubicle door swung open. "Leave a girl to sulk it out in peace, won't you— Brown?"

"Yes, that's me," said Lavender, a bit more coldly than necessary. She didn't think the question had been asked because Parkinson had trouble recognising her, but a few such implications during previous encounters with others had made her defensive.

Parkinson rolled her eyes. "I'm not _blind_ ; it was less of an 'oh, Brown, could that really be you?' and more of a 'Brown, why the fuck are _you_ interrupting my nice soggy blubbering session?'"

Lavender felt herself relax, shoulders falling from a height she hadn't known they'd reached.

"Oh," she said.

Parkinson raised a brow, and Lavender realised she hadn't actually addressed the question at all.

"Well," Lavender tried again, "you aren't the only one who's entitled to have a cry in the loo. Maybe _you_ should leave _me_ to do it in peace."

"I was here first."

"So you've got your crying done by now."

"It's not like there's a quota," Parkinson pointed out.

"What are you crying about, anyway?"

Parkinson barked out a rough laugh at that. "What am _I—_ are you seriously asking? I didn't think you were _that_ dim, Brown. What could I, girl-who-tried-to-give-the-Beloved-Saviour-up-to-the-Dark-Lord, hated by one and all, possibly have to be snotting myself about? I should be asking _you_ what right _you_ have to be juicing your eyes in here!"

Lavender had not heard that expression before. She remembers wondering exactly how many words Pansy could think of for _crying._ At present, she's satisfied that the limit does not exist.

"As you've reminded me, your vision is fine," Lavender snaps. "I think you can figure out what my problem might be. What people might whisper meanly about when I walk past. Why I have to be _here_ getting a bloody _dog collar_ built into my _wand_." Her voice cracked by the end, but it was a point of pride that her glare remained fierce throughout.

Something flickered across Parkinson's features, and Lavender only had one horrible second of thinking the Slytherin might be readying contempt, pity or both, before the expression was gone and Parkinson was drawling: "Better than a collar _and_ full-time surveillance." She drew her wand and held it up for Lavender to see. "Ollivander's just installed a mandatory intensity limit and _omnis incantato_ to send records of every spell I use to the Ministry. Suppose I'm lucky not to have had my wand snapped—not that I was ever actually a Death Eater."

"That really sucks," said Lavender. Genuinely, the thought of it was awful; some of the things she used magic for were so personal it would be an insane violation to have them disclosed to some gross old man in the parole office. She turned around to lean over the sink, trying to wipe her undereyes without disturbing her foundation. Even in the imprecise reflection offered by the mirror it was clear she had failed at this. Pink-rubbed skin showed through in patches, and traitorous 'waterproof' mascara painted itself around her eyes with every moistened blink.

"Yours sucks too, I suppose," Parkinson conceded. She came to lean against the side of the basin while Lavender inspected her hot mess of a face. "At least it was stupid shit I said and did that got me here. You did everything right and they're still fucking you over."

Cynical empathy, Lavender had decided then, was a whole lot less intolerable than overwrought sympathy.

❁

Pansy's hour of peace in the dormitory with Lavender and her notebook is rudely interrupted by five too many knocks at the door.

"Nobody's in!" she yells. When the knocker only takes it as encouragement, she caves; it isn't as though she's got any friends who'd come after her in so aggressive a fashion. Whoever it is will surely fuck off again when they realise the person they're looking for isn't here. "If you won't leave come in and get it over with."

The hammering continues.

"Door's locked," Lavender points out, flicking her wand to lift the warding spell.

Patil—Parvati, not Padma—bursts into the room looking flustered.

"Oh good," she cries when she sees Lavender. "Oh, good, Lav, you're here."

"Are you okay?" Pansy watches Lavender's pale brows furrow in concern.

"Fine! I mean, miserable without you, but I'm not, you know, injured or anything like that," Patil babbles. "I just want—need, in fact—to talk to you. I know you don't want to hear from me, but please. Please, Lav."

Patil looks utterly pathetic, in Pansy's expert opinion. Lavender's face is rapidly drooping into a similar picture of dismay.

"I don't not want to talk to you," says Lavender. "It's you who hasn't wanted to talk to me!"

" _Bull_ shit!" Patil all but screams. Pansy has a bit of a headache, but the drama is worth the pain. She takes a few notes; the two Gryffindors are so completely worked up it could be useful reference material for a future scene. "Bull _shit_!" Patil repeats. "I've been trying to talk to you all term! I wrote you letters!"

"Letters in which you never once asked if you could see me! Letters that were full of _nothing_ —small talk, like you were just trying to be _polite_. You were letting me down easy."

"I was—fuck, is that honestly what you think?—Lav! I was trying to give you space!" Patil's voice is reaching heights any opera singer or chipmunk would envy, thinks Pansy. "When I came to see you at Mungo's—well, you were out for a lot of the visits, but then the first time you were awake you told me not to look at you. To leave! And then you _never_ _told me to come back_!"

If Patil is looking to qualify for admission to the little friendship Pansy and Lavender have established, she's on the right track: liquefied mascara gathers in the creases under her eyes, her nose is red and she's wheezing as she tries to breathe along with shouting and oozing out of all her face holes.

"Why on earth would you think I didn't want to- to be your friend anymore? I've fucking loved you for years, Lavender Brown, and you're too clever not to have known it all along."

Lavender steps closer to Patil, closing the space slowly, cautiously. "I knew—back then, I knew. But how could I assume you'd feel the same now? I remember the things you'd say; _Oh, Lav, you're so perfect. Oh, Lav, I wish my brows were as even as yours. Your skin is so clear._ Those things are hardly true anymore, are they?"

Patil opens and closes her mouth dumbly a couple of times. Then she holds out a bunch of bent grey-green stems Pansy hadn't noticed she'd been holding in her hand.

Lavender is a lot more impressed by the strange, strangled, blossomless bouquet than Pansy; she lets out a  choked sort of squeal-sob and takes them, rubbing the leaves between her fingers and holding them up to her nose, breathing their herbal perfume deep as if she can actually smell anything with a nose that runny.

"I said those things," Patil says, a steel in her voice that definitely wasn't there before. Now that Lavender has accepted her weird gift, she's managed to grab ahold of that Gryffindor stubbornness again. "But that wasn't all I said. Those weren't the most important things—although I still think you're perfect. Except for the part where you think it's okay to end our friendship without finding out what I actually thought about it first. _You_ get mad when people assume _you're_ shallow."

Pansy expects Lavender to finish moving towards Patil—to scoop her up in a hug or plant a kiss on her mouth or something—but instead she staggers over to the nearest bed and sits down heavily.

"I might have projected slightly," she says quietly. "It was... hard. To come to grips with all this," she waves a hand vaguely in front of her scarred face. (A face which, for the record, Pansy finds sexy as hell. She's refrained from telling Lavender so after the first time, because it upsets her even as it comforts her, but that doesn't mean she can't ponder the wicked attractiveness of battle scars in the privacy of her own head.)

"I know. I know, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to accuse—"

"You've not accused me of anything I haven't done. Come sit?"

Lavender pats the comforter beside her and Patil goes to take a seat.

"Can I...?" she asks, looking at Lavender with wide eyes.

Lavender holds her arms out. "Yeah," she answers, and Patil leans into the embrace, burying her face in Lavender's nightshirt and shaking silently against it.

❁

It's like rain after the stickiest of summer days. Finally, Parvati can breathe again.

That's not to say everything—or anything, really—is back to normal. She's still sitting here on _Pansy Parkinson_ 's four-poster listening to Lavender debating the more intimate points of a fictional romantic encounter. She contributes herself every so often, but it's more a reader's perspective than an expert's.

As Pansy writes her notes (in a hand that's completely illegible to Parvati's eye, probably on purpose for secretive Slytherin ends) Lavender braids Parvati's hair, weaving in sunny-faced dandelions and stalks of velvety English lavender they found out on the grounds earlier, along with a couple of the pansies Parvati's been cultivating on her windowsill.

They still haven't quite talked about where they stand—they're friends again, and when Parvati's fingers linger on Lavender's skin, or stroke too fondly through her hair Lavender allows it, but even in the most charged moments their lips never quite meet.

"Merlin and Morgana, why can't they just start shagging already?" Pansy moans.

" _Because_ ," Lavender tells her long-sufferingly, "this one is a slow burn. You made this bed, Parkinson. Now Ethel and Marguerite have to lie in it, spooning and pining after one another."

"I don't understand how you people do it," Pansy yawns. "Romancing each other and all that."

This gives Parvati pause. "Wait," she says, "you don't like romance? You're a bloody romance storyteller!"

"Mmmm," Pansy drawls. "And sometimes I write about people slaying dragons, too; doesn't mean I'm personally a dragon-slayer."

"That's barbaric," Lavender interjects.

"It's an old pureblood tradition; of course it's barbaric. Anyway, I don't personally have any interest in romantic relationships. Dating, marriage—they're not for me. Sex is great, though."

Parvati thinks about this. She can't really imagine never feeling for anyone what she feels for Lavender, can't imagine living without ever being that close to anyone.

"Doesn't that get kind of... lonely?" she asks. "Always just... being casual?"

"I still have friends, Patil. Good friends. Friends whom I love—because I _am_ capable of love, contrary to popular opinion. I just don't like it mixed with sex in that way."

"Another venn diagram," Parvati says, processing the idea aloud.

"Exactly," Lav smiles at her. Her white teeth and silvery scarring and bright eyes all shimmer as the ball of light Pansy conjured earlier floats above her. Parvati's heart ticks arhythmically at the sight of it.

"Lavatory," Pansy declares, laying down her notebook and heading out of the room.

"That was... abrupt," observes Parvati.

"Pansy can be that way," Lavender says, that blinding smile still set all over her face. "She's very observant, though. I think she sensed something."

"Oh?" Parvati says, not daring to add anything more. She feels too frozen all of a sudden. Too _discovered_.

"When you barged in here, you said we needed to talk about things. About what we each wanted. I think you were right."

Parvati waits for it—either the confirmation she's been dreaming about or the rejection she's been dreading. Merlin, she hopes it's not rejection. What if Lav's so put off by the idea of Parvati being in love with her that she's rethinking the renewal of their friendship?"

"Hey," Lavender's hand takes Parvati's, meshing pale and dark fingers together, Lavender's white gold rings clinking against Parvati's yellow gold. There are little pink diamantes in the one on Lav's right ring finger, and a mood gem set into the one on her left pinkie, currently a deep red marbled with orange. On her wrist is the bangle Parvati gave her for her sixteenth birthday. "Stop panicking, Pav," Lavender soothes. "We're going to be okay no matter what. Want to go and pick some sage?"

Parvati shakes her head; the sage hasn't grown back enough since she plucked it all, and she doesn't feel fit to move to her own room to get it right now anyway.

"Okay," Lavender shrugs. "I got you something, actually. I was waiting for your birthday, but I want you to have it now."

Parvati waits with bated breath as Lavender pushes off the bed and makes her way towards the far window. Parvati can't see it well from where she is; Pansy's bed hangings are in the way.

Lavender returns with a chilli plant. Its fruits are fat heart-shapes, most of them fiery red but a few still turning from yellow and orange. The plant sits in a purple pot that shimmers with glitter, moving in galaxy-like swirls around its circumference.

There's a little tag attached, which Parvati flips over to read as soon as the plant is placed in her hands. _Pav,_ it says. _I'm told these chillies are almost as hot as you, so use them wisely. Lots of love from your Lav._

"Thank you," she says, grinning. "I love it."

"I love _you_ ," says Lavender. "I never stopped. And I know we never talked about it before either, but thinking I'd never get a chance to be with you again—thinking I might not even make it out of last year alive—made me realise how much I want to be with you. In all of the ways. Any of the ways in which you'll have me."

"Like... girlfriends?" Parvati asks, voice small and cautious. She doesn't think she'll be able to bear it if she's hearing this wrongly, and she certainly wouldn't survive the embarassment of leaning in to peck Lav on the lips only to be pushed gently away.

"Yeah," Lavender nods. "If you want."

Lav doesn't push her back. In fact, she pulls her in, refusing to let one quick peck be all they get from this moment. Her lips are soft, though the edge of a scar on one side gives them a different texture than they used to have. Lavender's hand at the back of Parvati's neck feels just the same, if a little more insistent, more sure of itself. Lavender tastes of berry lip gloss and the peppermints she's been snacking on. She smells of the same sweet, musky perfume she's always favoured, and just like the curry leaves it's a scent that makes Parvati's senses scream _home_.

They lounge around snogging and running revent hands over each other until it occurs to Pav that Pansy hasn't come out of the adjoining bathroom yet.

"Think she's okay in there?" she asks Lavender, gesturing at the bathroom door with a tilt of the head.

Lavender giggles. "She's fine, I'm certain of it. Probably casting douching charms at the sinks by this point." At Parvati's raised eyebrow, Lavender explains: "As a fuck you to the Ministry tracking what spells she uses." She lowers her voice. "I thought _I_ knew some interesting spells, but they're nothing on Pansy's repertoire. She knows at least seventeen ways to induce an orgasm, and she's invented her own variations on the usual menstrual spells."

"Merlin," Parvati laughs. "That's some way of getting her own back..."

"...and you want to know all of those spells right now immediately," Lavender reads Parvati's pause perfectly.

"Definitely," Parvati grins.

"Oi, Pansy. Wipe your butt and get out here!"

Two seconds later, Pansy's emerging. She regards the two of them and seems satisfied with what she sees.

"Finally," is all she says. "So, I had this idea about the backstory of our Veela character, and I want your input, Parvati, since I know about pureblood Chinese-British parents but nothing about Indian ones."

"I'm here to help," says Parvati, shifting along so that Pansy can slide onto the bed alongside her. It's an odd bouquet the three of them make, complementary in ways Parvati might once have dismissed as strange. But they've all survived stranger times than these, haven't they? And if they have to arrange the parts of how things used to be in new ways to make them work, then Parvati can't wait to see how else their future comes together.


End file.
